Itching

I'm still itching like crazy from the chronic munching I had from mosquitos on Hampstead Heath whilst recording my audio blog inside a tree! The things I do for art. 

Last night's filming ended in a typically eccentric style. Each of the choir members being filmed was given a word written on a piece of card which they held up in increasingly unusual and daring locations from tuk tuks to sex shop windows. The atmosphere on the streets of Soho was electric. Druggies, trannies, prozzies and Hare Krishnas all rubbing shoulders. 

The shoot ended in a phone box, which we'd filled with photographs of gravestones amongst the cards for dominatrixes. 

We've just got back from watching Torch Song Trilogy at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Our friend Sara was playing the mother... Beautifully. It was a true acting master class which I found deeply moving. She managed to make a character with few redeeming features into an incredibly complex figure who oozed pain and inner turmoil. 

350 years ago Pepys was thrilled to report that his house was now "quite tiled", which meant his carpets and drapes were now safe. 

Funeral films

We're doing a film shoot today which is due to end at 1am, so heaven knows when I'm going to get the opportunity to post this blog! 

I'm currently in a funeral parlour in Camden, interviewing an undertaker about the industry of death, and how difficult it can be to deal with high emotion on a daily basis. He has a delightfully soporific voice which is massaging my synapses. He's obviously used to talking to people very calmly and sensitively. He should read bed time books for blind people! 

Earlier on, we filmed Nathan, who's presenting the sixth film, doing pieces to camera. We don't have a permit to film anywhere, so every time someone official walks past, we disappear into a side street, or begin to practice our excuses. 

Later, we shall be out and about in Soho, which could prove to be mayhem on a Friday night. 

August 10th, 1662, was a Sunday, and Pepys went to visit the newly refurbished St Sepulchre's church, which he liked a great deal. One assumes the church was destined to burn down in the great fire just over 3 years later. Bet they wish they hadn't bothered! 

Dusk on the heath

I’m sitting on a whale-shaped fallen tree on Hampstead Heath, waiting my turn to climb inside the “tree with the hole” to record one of my audio blogs for the Requiem project. There are two dreadlocked white people sitting inside, having a rather intense conversation about life, which I’m loathed to interrupt. However, if they’re still sitting there by the time I’ve written this blog, I might have to ask if they’d mind my stepping in for a few minutes.

The heath is a funny old place on a smoky, dusty, mid summer’s night. The whole place becomes a giant speaker system, and you can hear people talking miles away, so still and soft is the air. It’s a very magical place.

A group of children has now moved into the tree. They’re Americans and they’re projecting! I’m quite impressed that their parents are encouraging them to be as quiet as possible. In this kind of acoustic you genuinely don’t need to do anything other than whisper! I also rather love the fact that there are little kids wondering around the heath at dusk. These are the long summer days which they’ll remember for the rest of their lives. Magical places like this tree are made even more special when the fading light starts to play tricks on the mind. There’s many a time I’ve come to the heath at this time, and seen all sorts of ghostly shapes and hues out of the corner of my eye.

Today’s been about admin and started at Highgate cemetery, where we’re filming next Wednesday. The lovely woman who showed me around brought my attention to a plaque in their newly refurbished chapel. The tablet was left in 1877 and is dedicated to a 36 year old man called George, “he was my friend, faithful and just to me...” and is signed “by his sorrowing friend, Albert”

It would be conjecture in the extreme for me to suggest that these were a pair of gay Victorian lovers, but the plaque serves to remind us that since the beginning of time, gay men and women have been rather shunned by the conventions of death. Even these, I’m sad to say, that it’s still slightly distasteful for two men to want to be buried together.

The American family are still here – and it’s getting really dark. The father is obsessively taking photographs of the inside of the tree – the flash light is blinding me - and Mom is spreading out a picnic. All very nice and everything (if not slightly eccentric at dusk) but as I wait, my computer batteries are running low, and hundreds of mosquitoes have started to buzz around my head. They don’t usually like me, but I reckon these ones are going to make an exception.

This afternoon I went into Crouch End, and then to Muswell Hill, preparing stuff for our shoot tomorrow. We’re trying to film sequences to accompany the Offertory, which is the most experimental of all the movements. PK has just sent me a series of mind-numbing mixes which both terrify and thrill me!

August 9^th, 1662, and Pepys, yet again, was up at 4am, getting on with a day of business which took him East to Trinity House and then west as far as Whitehall.

Glassy rivers

It's my birthday! I've been in Hackney all day editing the fourth in our suite of films for the Space. Curiously it is also the editor, Hazel's birthday, so when I arrived, Penny handed us both a little Olympic souvenir gift. We ate egg sandwiches for lunch made from the most delicious home made bread. Penny's house always smells of freshly-baked bread. 

This evening I went to Thaxted with Nathan and Helen, and we sat for hours lapping up passages from my Mum's extraordinary diaries. Now I know what my Mum had for dinner the night I was born; an apricot trifle! 

We stopped off on the journey home in Grantchester Meadows and recorded my fourth set of composer's notes for The Space project by moonlight. The air smelt of aniseed and budlia. As I finished talking, a magical mist descended and hovered above the glass-like river. 

Earlier on I received some very sad news via my mother. My brother's best friend at school was a lad called Scott, who died today. He'd had cancer, but my brother, who went to visit him a month ago, seemed to think that things were looking fairly positive. Scott was talking about the future and seemed fairly upbeat. Life can be so intolerably cruel sometimes. I shall remember him fondly. 

August 8th, 1662 and Pepys went to Woolwich and then Greenwich to look at different types of hemp, one assumes seeing what sort would make the best rope. The diary entry goes on forever, Pepys reporting in every detail a rather pompous pseudo-philosophical  conversation he'd had with his superior William Coventry. Deeply yawnsome.

Olympic Junkie

I’m watching the Olympics like a true junkie at the moment. I’d intravenously inject newsfeeds if I could. Periodically I treat myself for working hard by having a quick look at the BBC website to see if we’ve won any more golds. I’m always the same with the Olympics. The first one I can remember was 1980. We were on holiday in Tenby and must have been lucky enough to have a television in our guesthouse room. With this in mind, it’s probably quite surprising that I was so profoundly against the Olympics being staged in London. In fairness, my beef was always that I felt money was being diverted from the arts in order to stage the event, and that ordinary Londoners were being screwed over in the process. I still believe this to be the case, but am simultaneously very pleased to belong to the hosting nation, and ferociously proud of the GB athletes who have done so well. The Olympics are genuinely proving to be an antidote to the pain of this year’s bad weather and the awful financial situation we’re all in, and for that, I’m hugely grateful. My hard-line position thaws with each day, and sometimes I even find myself wishing that I’d booked to see an event; how many of us wish we were in the main stadium on Super Saturday, for example?

What bores me, however, (as a veritable connoisseur of the BBC’s coverage) is these silly glamour-pusses who are dusted up and stuck in front of BBC cameras to work as the anchors for Olympic coverage. You know the ones; zero personality, lip-gloss like olive oil, perfect complexions generated by trowel-loads of make-up and, more crucially, no interest in sport. I’m not talking about the wonderful female presenters who genuinely do know their stuff. Sue Barker – great. Denise Lewis – great. Clare Balding – double great (God, I love that woman)... But for every one of those genuine sports women, there’s three of these blandly attractive female presenters. I watched a woman this morning describing one of the corners of the triathlon route as a “hair pin bend” and worrying that the blokes running ‘round it might slip over. The person who she was interviewing stared at her disbelievingly. They’ve started parachuting these women onto football shows as well, thereby creating an own goal for the BBC. They do it, of course, to prove that sport isn’t a male-dominated world, but by selecting personality-free dolly birds, they play into the hands of chauvinists, who will either objectivise the women or legitimately argue, “well if that’s the best you can do, women obviously don’t know a thing about sport.” News anchors are the same. There’s a revolving series of silly young women who seem to present BBC London news, all, we assume, hoping to be promoted to prime time entertainment slots as quickly as possible. When will the BBC stop sacking the women with wisdom and age on their side, simply because they’re not perceived as totty any more?

I’ve been in Durham all day. Another first! We’ve been making a film to launch my next project, 100 Faces. The question we’re asking people across the North East and Cumbria: Why was 2012 important for you? We “vox-popped” that very question to a number of Durham’s finest today. It’s astonishing how open and willing to chat people are in the North East. We had some wonderful answers; “2012 was the year I got back together with my wife after splitting up for 2 years” and perhaps my favourite, which came from a 10-year old lad; “2012 was the year I finally made double figures!”

I’m afraid it’s still a secret what I shall be doing with the answers to these question, but the launch will happen next Wednesday, so if you live in that region, keep your eyes and ears peeled...

On the way back from Durham, I achieved another mini-first by visiting the curiously named Durham suburb of Pity Me, which features on the soundtrack to my A1 film. “Why is there a town called Pity Me?” The lorry driver asks. I’m still none the wiser. When I asked one of the residents the question, she looked a bit confused and said “I think the name goes back to the 16^th Century.” Wikipedia offers up a number of theories, one of which suggests the name might have been coined in the 19^th Century as “a whimsical name bestowed on a place considered desolate, exposed or difficult to cultivate...” Surely there are maps from earlier than the 19^th Century which would show if this were a valid theory?

August 7^th, 1662, and Pepys was, once again up at 4am and in the office, working hard, by 5. He continued to find great pleasure in the work he was doing, and felt greatly proud of himself for abstaining from wine, plays and adultery!

A little visit

I’m in Cumbria of all places, speeding across the gloriously beautiful Pennines to Newcastle on one of the prettiest train journeys I’ve ever taken. I keep hoping to see a bit of Hadrian’s Wall. One of my greatest ambitions in life is to see one of the relatively intact sections of this mystical monument. We tried to find it as children, but didn’t know where to look.

My next project for the BBC involves working right the way across the top of England... True North, if you like; basically everything between Scotland and Yorkshire and Lancashire. It’s one of those British regions without a name, and I suspect people in Newcastle would question how much they had in common with Cumbrians, Northumbrians, or Teesiders. It’ll be really interesting to see what emerges.

What became immediately apparent in my meeting last week was that I didn’t actually know anything about Cumbria. I must have passed through it several times on my way up to Glasgow, and remember once stopping off for lunch in, I think, Penrith, but I’ve never visited the Lake District, and when people started mentioning places like Barrow-In-Furness, I couldn’t even bring an image of a place to my mind.

Cumbria for me is that slightly terrifying place where Windscale Nuclear Power Station was. I think the nuclear reactors got into trouble at some point in my childhood and I thought the world was coming to an end.

The Lovely Nell from BBC Cumbria offered to give me a special tour of the county and I couldn’t wait to get up there. I am a great fan of exploring new corners of Britain, and the opportunity to be shown around by a local should never be passed up.

The tour started in Carlisle, which I found surprisingly attractive, even in the pouring rain. The area around the Cathedral is particularly pleasant, and I was very taken with a little row of Victorian shops opposite the BBC building there including a hoover shop, which I’m told has the friendliest staff you’re ever likely to find.

From Carlisle we travelled East to Wigton, a market town which seems to have been engulfed by a giant plastics factory, and from Wigton we went to the curiously-named, hugely-isolated seaside village of Silloth, where we ate chips on the beach, and wandered around an arcade with enormous shatter-proof windows which looked out onto the angry brown Irish sea. “Is the sea round here always brown?” I asked. Apparently it is.

Silloth feels like a rather sad little place. It’s absolutely charming. A wide cobbled street and a series of tree-lined parks separate seafront houses from the sea itself. I don’t know if the tide was in, but there didn’t seem to be any sign of a beach. A pathetic little funfair shivered in front of a factory. Two children were spinning endlessly on a waltzer, the fairground attendant no doubt thrilled to have a couple of quid’s worth of custom. A married couple ate chips from the back of the only car parked in the funfair’s car park. When we returned half an hour later, the place was entirely empty. The strange fairground whooshes, bell-tings and heavy-bass chart music continued, as did the enticing and inane flashing lights, but there was absolutely no one there to play. A little piece of me died.

The Cumbrians seem very friendly, if not a little reticent. There’s definitely a guardedness that isn’t present on the East coast. Across the Solway Firth we could see the mountains of Scotland shrouded in mist, hiding secrets which we’ll never be able to access.

We drove south along the coastal road, past mile after mile of empty beach, past little houses with their hatches battened down, chips shops with pink neon signs dancing in the grey sky and windswept sand dunes bedecked in purple and yellow flowers.

Before long we were entering Whitehaven, diving through a Victorian house-lined ravine into the town centre with its smashed church windows, and deserted houses sliding down hillsides. This is where Derek Bird went on his shooting spree and the town genuinely feels like it’s sinking underneath the weight of the pain. Tainted by death, it feels, like a recently bereaved widow.

Sad as these coastline towns may have seemed, there is something filmic and intriguing about the area. It draws you in and fills your head with questions.

350 years ago, and Pepys diary was full of intrigue. Sir William Batten was losing his grip; and potentially his position at the Navy office. Lord Sandwich's spoilt son had taken to fighting duels, and losing them with no honour (usually by running away). Pepys worked late into the night, and was paid a little visit; "writing in my study a mouse ran over my table, which I shut up fast under my shelfs upon my table till tomorrow"

Cambridge joy

We’ve been in Cambridge all day, celebrating my birthday in an unofficial sort of way. We arrived in a rain storm, and the forecast was fairly dire for the rest of the day, so we sat under a tree, in a miserable heap, trying to eat a picnic whilst the rain lashed down around us. I guess it was a fairly miserable moment for us all. The tree kept us relatively dry, and there were tiny slithers of blue in the sky, but periodically an enormous drip of water would land on my head and a sense of sadness would engulf me once again. All hopes of punting out into the countryside around Grantchester vanished. The idea of being stranded on a punt which was slowly filling with water made me shudder.

We decided instead to wait for the rain to clear and hope for enough of a window in the weather for a quick punt along “The Backs.”Oddly, just as I was about to throw in the towel and suggest we just went to the pub, the sun popped out, and suddenly there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

My companions for the day were Ian, Jem, Nathan, Sam and James from the choir, Brother Edward and Sam’s Matt. It was a very gay day, and as a result, we all felt incredibly relieved to be joined by the feminine energy of James’ friend Gill, and, of course my brilliant parents.

We hired two punts and, whilst drifting along The Backs, Brother Edward (a Cambridge graduate) offered us all fake information about the colleges we were passing “this college was built by students from an Ikea flat pack in the mid 1990s,” he said, and as we passed a 1960s block of flats, he told us we were passing a "fine example of Norman architecture." Heaven knows what the American tourists must have made of it all.

We kept expecting the rain, but it never came, so after returning the punts, we went to Jesus Green, and sat on a bench playing a most ridiculous game involving cards and spoons. I don’t often laugh so much that I can’t breathe, but there was something really wonderful about the company, and something very amusing about the game.

We took silly photographs outside King’s College, as the clouds turned from white to black and an eerie wind started to whistle through the Cambridge lanes.

The rain came in bucket loads, just before we reached the train station on the journey home, but as we charged though the countryside towards London, the evening sun started dancing across the fields and glinting in our faces through the train window. More photographs. More laughter. Pains in my arms from the punting... but all worth it. A wonderful day.

Just how cool is it that the Royal Mail are painting their post boxes gold near to the homes of the Olympic athletes who have won their events?

August 5^th, 1662, and Pepys finally made it back home from his boat journey from Rochester at 3am. His long suffering, deeply faithful servant, Jane, waited up for him, and he slept until 9am, relieved that tiling had finally started on his newly extended house. Very soon it would be able to start raining again without Pepys going into apoplexy.